Oolite Bulletins

I currently own two elderly PPC Macs; an iBook G4 1.2ghz, 1.25gb RAM, and an iMac G4, 700mhz, currently 500mb but will soon be 1gb RAM.

I have Oolite 1.76 on the iBook and it works but isn't any great ball of fire. I haven't tried it on the iMac G4, I'm still refurbishing that and it has some minor problems I'd like to fix before getting fancy, and given its slowness I doubt it will be much good with any recent version of Oolite.

What I'm wondering is if there's an early release that runs FAST on these older machines. Doesn't need to do much more than the original Elite, neither machine will ever be my preferred gaming platform, but it would be nice to have something to entertain friends who were Elite-heads in the BBC days.

Dunno.

A closely related question is, which old versions can you actually get hold of? I posted the two I have lying around for you to try:

• oolite1.40.dmg
• oolite1.65.dmg

Obviously no-one can offer anything even resembling support for these; I don’t have anything old enough to even run them.

Fair enough - I'll try them both and let you know how I get on.

If I recall correctly, Commander McLane keeps an extensive archive of older Mac versions..

Diziet Sma wrote:

If I recall correctly, Commander McLane keeps an extensive archive of older Mac versions..

The oldest I have lying around is Oolite 1.01.dmg (3.7 MB). I remember that it worked with OS Tiger. It is a really basic version of Oolite

I remember that Oolite 1.65 contains a lot of speed improvements, so it might even be faster than the version 1.40
My archive also contains a version 1.55. But only versions 1.65 and higher still run on the current OS Marvericks.

One warning with those old versions in combination with oxp's. A lot of oxp's don't specify a minimum oolite version, resulting in Oolite trying to load the newer oxp's. The old Oolite versions however don't like complex ships and crash on loading them. There is no check for ships with to many triangles.

They both sort of work on the 700mhz iMac, but both have some jerkiness. 1.40 feels very slightly faster, but is very limited in other respects. I think I may have to accept I can't really use the iMac for this. Hopefully I'll have better luck with the iBook.

Eric Walch wrote:

I remember that Oolite 1.65 contains a lot of speed improvements, so it might even be faster than the version 1.40

By the same reasoning, 1.76 should be faster than 1.65, but somehow it never works out that way. :-)

I first played Oolite on a 233 MHz G3, but it wasn’t exactly butter-smooth.

Well, I found a solution - bought a friend's Macbook, 2ghz late 2006 model, currently 2gb but I'll probably upgrade the RAM. Seems to work a LOT better - however, I'm not seeing hyperspace jump effects, just an abrupt transition from one system to the next. Anyone know what that's about?

The 2006 models (I have an early 2006 one - almost never use it) used the dreaded Intel GMA 950 graphics chip, which can only access a whopping 64 MB of video RAM (or 224MB if you run Windoze via bootcamp).

So basically, you're stuck with a crap graphics chip, one which has probably had more complaints/problems reported with Oolite, than all other graphics chips combined. You may need to turn down the graphics settings in Oolite (and/or, if you're using it, disable some of the BGS effects settings, via OXPConfig).

On the bright side.. you can run Lion on yours.. I'm stuck with Snow Leopard.

ffutures wrote:

currently 2gb but I'll probably upgrade the RAM

Note that though you can fit 4GB, due to other hardware limitations, only 3GB is actually usable.. so don't waste the money on the extra 1GB. Assuming you have a pair of 1GB sticks in it now, just buy a single 2GB stick, not a pair. I made that mistake with the ASUS laptop I'm using now. (and be glad you don't have the early 2006 model - 2GB is the maximum)

Diziet Sma wrote:

The 2006 models (I have an early 2006 one - almost never use it) used the dreaded Intel GMA 950 graphics chip, which can only access a whopping 64 MB of video RAM (or 224MB if you run Windoze via bootcamp).

So basically, you're stuck with a crap graphics chip, one which has probably had more complaints/problems reported with Oolite, than all other graphics chips combined. You may need to turn down the graphics settings in Oolite (and/or, if you're using it, disable some of the BGS effects settings, via OXPConfig).

On the bright side.. you can run Lion on yours.. I'm stuck with Snow Leopard.

ffutures wrote:

currently 2gb but I'll probably upgrade the RAM

Note that though you can fit 4GB, due to other hardware limitations, only 3GB is actually usable.. so don't waste the money on the extra 1GB. Assuming you have a pair of 1GB sticks in it now, just buy a single 2GB stick, not a pair. I made that mistake with the ASUS laptop I'm using now. (and be glad you don't have the early 2006 model - 2GB is the maximum)

Thanks for the info re the graphics chip - can't say I'm astonished, it works well enough for most of my needs so I'll have to live with the downside - I only paid £150 for the computer.

Re memory, while they can't use the fourth gigabyte directly, putting in 4gb allegedly speeds them up a bit because they use 128-bit memory addressing if both DIMMs are the same. I'm still costing that one out, looking for the best deal I can find on the RAM. I got the iMac up to 1gb (from 256mb) for about £12 by being patient and waiting for a good deal to come along, I'm hoping I can do something similar with the MacBook.

ffutures wrote:

however, I'm not seeing hyperspace jump effects, just an abrupt transition from one system to the next.

Hmm. Smells like a no-shader support thing. BGS usually configures itself, but when looking at Oolites v1.80 announcement I'd say it can't work anymore.

Announcing Oolite v1.80 wrote:

* Graphics settings have changed to merge "shader settings" and "reduced detail" into a single option. There is an 'extra detail' option suitable for dedicated graphics cards.

Searching the board for gameSettings shows v1.80 properties -> https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f= ... 25&start=6. The Wiki needs an update.

This means that OXP/OXZ-checks for reducedDetailGraphics or shaderEffectsLevel don't work anymore (removed in v1.80). If I recall it right the shader preprocessor directives OO_REDUCED_COMPLEXITY and OO_LIGHT_0_FIX have been removed as well, so some shaders may do stuff your gfx-card is not prepared for or the shaders will use e.g. the wrong light source, etc.

Svengali wrote:

ffutures wrote:

however, I'm not seeing hyperspace jump effects, just an abrupt transition from one system to the next.

Hmm. Smells like a no-shader support thing. BGS usually configures itself, but when looking at Oolites v1.80 announcement I'd say it can't work anymore.

Announcing Oolite v1.80 wrote:

* Graphics settings have changed to merge "shader settings" and "reduced detail" into a single option. There is an 'extra detail' option suitable for dedicated graphics cards.

Searching the board for gameSettings shows v1.80 properties -> https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f= ... 25&start=6. The Wiki needs an update.

This means that OXP/OXZ-checks for reducedDetailGraphics or shaderEffectsLevel don't work anymore (removed in v1.80). If I recall it right the shader preprocessor directives OO_REDUCED_COMPLEXITY and OO_LIGHT_0_FIX have been removed as well, so some shaders may do stuff your gfx-card is not prepared for or the shaders will use e.g. the wrong light source, etc.

Well, this will never be my main games machine, I'll pull some of the OXPs and have a more minimal installation on it. Thanks for the heads-up.

We all need to buy ourselves some nice new computers don't we? (Me included, I'm still keeping 2 ppc macs running) thing is I've lost the love for apple. They used to be such a better company than they are now. I'm finding a lot of things going that way. Google are slowly becoming evil too.

Problem is I really dislike windows and I'm unsure I have the brain to scratch build a linux box.

ClymAngus wrote:

Google are slowly becoming evil too.

Slowly? They'll be one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes!